Many procedures and devices are known to qualitatively and quantitatively test textile fibers. Random fiber material, such as cotton in flock form, cannot be measured directly in many procedures, but instead first must be prepared into slivers of fibers with these fibers being made parallel. Accordingly, such pre-parallelized fibers are the input material to all test means that demand parallelized fibers.
Illustratively such test means are:
fiber aligners implementing the end arrangement of fiber tufts,
brushing stations for fiber tufts without end arrangement,
tension testers determining tear strength and elongating of bundles,
optical scanners such as pictorial data analyzers,
fiber-ripeness testers,
fiber-fineness testers,
fiber grading devices, etc.
Mechanized devices for making such slivers of fibers are already known, illustratively from the special issue by G. Spiridonow in MELLIAND TEXTILBERICHTE 59 (1978). Essentially this known device consists of a plain roller stretcher, that is of a pair of feed rollers and a pair of output rollers. It is clear from this that using such a simple, manually driven device, the manufacture of fiber slivers with parallelized fibers is time-consuming and low in reproducibility. Manual operation demands high skill and moreover entails constant contact between the bare hand and the raw material so that sweat contamination is unavoidable.